


aim for my heart, go for blood

by akosmia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Curses, Exes, F/M, Getting Back Together, Mentions of Death, Miscommunication, Witch Curses, Witches, no one actually dies I promise, this has a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26733268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akosmia/pseuds/akosmia
Summary: In a world where magic exists, words hold an ancient, raw power and curses are a sharp, lethal weapon to be wary of, double-edged as they are.Rey learns it on her skin the day she curses Ben.“I curse you, Ben Solo. Whatever you love the most in this world– you'll lose it.” Then, with a sad sort of smile, she adds, “It shouldn't be a problem, since you don't seem able to love anything.”-- or: after he betrays her and leaves her to work for their enemy, Rey curses Ben to lose the thing he loves the most in the world. Then, a few days later, she starts to die.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 171
Kudos: 551
Collections: Galactic Idiots Collection, Ijustfellintothissendhelp





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> i keep saying i have too much of a tender heart to write angst and YET, here i am on this website, posting my personal angst fest of a fic *sighs* i contain multitudes i guess  
>   
> this fic was, like almost everything i've written in the past few months, inspired by [ this ](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots/status/1302998984319959040?s=20) prompt by Fran, which absolutely d e s t r o y e d me, then it kind of slipped out of my hands and now it's two chapters bc of who i am as a person lbr
> 
> also, i tagged this as best as i could, but if you think i missed something or i could improve the tags, please don't hesitate to tell me! making this a safe space for everyone is a priority for me so please let me know! also if you don't feel comfortable doing here or you want to reach out on anon, there's a link to my tumblr or my curiouscat in the end notes, so you can reach me there!

In a world where magic exists, words hold an ancient, raw power and curses are a sharp, lethal weapon to be wary of, double-edged as they are. 

Rey learns it on her skin the day she curses Ben. 

It's a quiet autumn night in the woods and they're both wrapped in a deep, bruising darkness that leaves no room for anything else but harsh words. The only source of light in the forest – except for the pale, weak moonlight filtering through the trees – is coming from the fire she has summoned in her hand, consuming the shadows in bursts of white-hot light. 

The words escape her lips in a bitter, mindless haze before she can stop herself – words just like the fire currently dancing in her palm and wrecking her heart, words born out of pain and rage and desperation and a kind of mad, impossible longing that burns the soul out of her. 

He's hurt her, so now she wants to hurt him. 

There's no voice to remind her, _Be careful what you wish for_. There's no one to stop her. There’s no power in the world who could talk reason into her. There's just the fury of her words and the few feet between them that look like an insurmountable chasm. 

It's so devastatingly easy she doesn't even have to wonder about it. She doesn't have to linger on the shock on his face, on the fear in his eyes. On the pain in his voice when he tries to call her back, lost in the darkness behind her. 

It doesn't matter. It's done and she won't take it back. 

Then, a few days later, she starts to die.

✨

Ben slips into her life as naturally as the trees change color in the fall, an explosion of blinding light in her otherwise dull world, and by the time he leaves without any explanation, there's a hole in her existence she doesn't know how to fill. 

The aftermath is such a quiet thing it's almost ridiculous, in its uneventful unfolding. Naive as it may sound, she'd expected something _grander_ – ruins and destruction, fire and ashes and blood, a city in shambles, a storm to match her grief. 

Instead, it's just _this_. 

It's a quiet sort of absence – like a muted version of the existence she used to know, as if all the colors of the world had lost its radiance without Ben by her side. There's no storm or ruin to match the mess he's made of her heart, but there's a cold place where he used to lie next to her on the bed and a plate in the sink where once there were two. Late at night, she practices spells and enchantments on her own, instead of with him.

She tries not to miss the warmth of his embrace when she lies on her side at night and wraps her arms around her body just to remember what it feels like, to be _held_. 

Months pass by, without any awareness. Summer turns into fall, the leaves shine with a vein of gold that catches the trembling light of the uncertain autumn sun and still, she can't see any of it. As if he'd cursed her, as if his absence had painted a coat of gray over every color she's ever loved. 

It feels like dying, but slowly. As if all of her energies had started to bleed out of her in a painful, excruciating process. 

Then, one day she finds a note on her kitchen table. There's a silvery shine to it, as if it reflected some light she can't see, and Rey immediately recognizes Ben's neat handwriting, every letter traced with infinite care, as if the mere act of pressing a pen down to the paper were somehow more meaningful than she could ever imagine. 

> _Meet me at our place. Please. I know you don't trust me, but it's important. – B_

The note disintegrates in her hands after she's read it and she tries really hard not to make a metaphor out of it. 

✨

They meet at the place where the city starts to disappear and the ancient forest comes to claim the land – a place between worlds, where reality crashes into an older,wilder world and something in the ground pulses in time with her heart, as if recognizing the call of her own magic. 

It does not surprise her, when she finds out he's already there, a dark shape among the trees, waiting for her in the cold autumn breeze. He looks more like a shadow than a human being in his black clothes – the outline of a person with an empty space there where his heart is supposed to be. 

What surprises her, though, is the utter _silence_ coming from him – unnatural and terrifying in its stillness like the perfect calm in the eye of the storm. In all the time she's known him, Ben has never been _quiet_ – though he rarely spoke, there was always the hungry roar of his own magic to call to her, a yearning she could understand all too well because it mirrored her own. 

There's no trace of his magic brushing against hers as she approaches him now, no trembling in it the moment she steps into the light of the moon. He's just _quiet_. She can't sense him the way she usually could and she finds it in this moment, how the absence is something that, despite its definition, you can _feel_.

He's closed her off, she realizes. 

It hurts more than she would have imagined, this silence. It's just – so _loud_ , there in the space where there once was an uninterrupted conversation between their powers, a reassuring lull that reminded her of the ocean in its eternal movement. 

She's been on her own for months now, and yet she feels a new kind of loneliness creep into her bones all of the sudden. 

“Rey,” he starts, when she stops a few feet away from him. His voice is as unreadable as the rest of him – unknowable and distant in that special way only Ben can be. He's weirdly gracious when he nods in acknowledgement and adds, like a mindful host, “Thank you for coming here. I know you don't trust me.”

His face, when a slant of moonlight filters through the branches and bounces off the leaves in a burst of silvery light, is just as unreadable as the rest of him – a book written in an ancient language she never learned how to master, even if she thought she had for a while. 

She scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest, as if to protect what's left of her heart. 

“You could have texted,” she tells him, raising her eyebrows. “No need to be so dramatic.”

The air around him shifts slightly when he tilts his head to the side, his eyes trained on her. “Texts can be found. Better not to leave traces.”

The words stir emotions in her heart she doesn't know how to define – a mixture of rage and pain and stubborn, devastating hope that steals the air from her lungs. She knows she's setting herself up for another heartbreak, and still, she can't help to, when it comes to him, as if he were a mistake she's destined to make over and over again. 

Her own personal fatal flaw. 

“Why?” she asks him, then. Her eyes never leave his face, as if to study the smallest changes in his expression, but he wears the darkness like a cape, draping it all around him as if to shroud himself from her inquisitive gaze. “Having trouble with Snoke? He isn't that trustworthy, is he?”

He says nothing. There's no opening in the perfect wall he's erected between the two of them, no crack in it. If she were to throw herself at it, she would gain nothing but a bruised soul. 

Still, there's _something else_ – an unsettling stillness coming from him, an eerie silence that reminds her of light caught up in the event horizon of a black hole. It's just _too_ _quiet_ , as if this silence, too, were a feeling. 

She wants to shake him. She wants to scream at him. She wants him to do _something_ , instead of standing there and stare at her blankly. Most of all, she wants to walk up to him and grab him by his shoulders and just hold him in her arms until the mask falls off his face and she's looking at the Ben she knows again.

The Ben she lost. 

Instead, she sinks her short nails into her palms and grits her teeth and hopes, prays he can't feel the way her magic _aches_ , the way she longs for something she can't have anymore – something that, maybe, she never had in the first place.

“Fine, let's cut the bullshit. What is it?” she asks, raising her chin in a show of defiance. “I came here like you asked me to. What do you want from me?”

_What do you want that you haven't already taken and then discarded?_

There's a faint movement in the shadows that surround him, as if he'd flinched at her voice, at her words, at the vicious hostility in it. But that would mean that he actually cares, and she knows he doesn't. 

He doesn't, because he wouldn't have broken her heart in the cruelest way if he had. 

“I– I just–” he starts, then sighs. In the faint light of the moon, she sees him pinch the bridge of his nose, as he often did out of frustration. It seems unfair, that she's got to know him so well and yet she's had to let him go. It shouldn't be allowed, this kind of pointless cruelty of _knowing_ someone and then losing them. “Nevermind. I just wanted to warn you.”

A cold wind comes to shake the trees, making the fallen leaves dance around their feet, and she rubs her hands down her arm as if to spark some sort of warmth in her frozen bones. Dread floods her chest – mind-numbing and freezing, as if she'd started to drown in icy waters. 

“Interesting,” she says, raising her eyebrows, fully aware of the way her heart twists into her ribcage and yet pretending she can’t feel it, this surge of pain that wrecks her consciousness. “So you're _threatening_ me now? Did Snoke put you up to this? Are you doing what he tells you to do?”

He lets out a sound between a groan and a sigh, then shakes his head, and she wonders how things could have gone so wrong between the two of them. His hair – dark as the night around them, bleeding into it as if he were made of shadows, too – falls a bit on his forehead and her hands burn from the need to brush it away. 

Even now, even as he has broken her heart and left her for Snoke. 

It is a difficult thing, to stop loving him. He's a curse she can't break, haunting her at every turn, hanging over every thought and every foolish desire. The ghost that will always linger, the _what-if_ she will never stop thinking about. 

“No,” he exhales, through gritted teeth. “This is not a threat. I would never– I just–” He shakes his head again, his hands clenched into fists. His eyes are fixed on the darkness in front of him, as if it were easier, not to look at her. “It doesn't matter anymore. I just came here to tell you to lay low for a while. Hide from Snoke. He was after you before I– well, I don't see why you should make it easier for him.”

It happens before she's aware of it – the words echo in the empty forest for a moment, disappearing in the darkness, and then she's laughing, an hysterical thing that bursts on her lips in the silence that surrounds them. 

His gaze, when he brings it on her, is full of confusion and he frowns, schooling his feature into such a familiar expression that she feels the need to smooth the _v_ between his eyebrows. 

But she doesn't. 

“Are you for real?” she asks him.

Ben stays in silence – a silence that feels so unnatural between the two of them, because they used to talk _all the time_ before. Before he left her for Snoke, she supposes. Before he deemed her unworthy of love, like her parents had before him. Before he betrayed everything she stood for and shattered her heart in the process. 

“Well,” she continues, when he doesn't reply but just stares at her with that unnerving calm that is making her stomach churn and her broken heart twist helplessly into her ribcage. “Maybe you should have thought about it before you joined him. Aren't you happy now? Why does it matter if he's after me? I thought you just didn't care. For all I know, you want me dead.”

A loud exhale slips past his gritted teeth and he brings a hand to his chest as if she'd just stabbed him.

For a moment, the ferocious grip he has on his magic falters and she’s finally able to glimpse something beneath the careful, controlled façade he’s put on and–

Her breath comes out in a low wheeze and she almost doubles down because the impact of his feelings is – _too much_. It feels as if her brain can't comprehend it – she can't imagine how a person could feel _so much_ and not scream in _agony_ at the sensation. Pain rolls off him in waves, so sharp it feels like a knife between her ribs, but there's something else running along with it. 

A terrible, impossible sensation that feels almost like–

Before she can grasp that elusive feeling hanging in the air, he recovers. His magic disappears in a wisp of smoke, twirling around her consciousness for a second more before fading out in the darkness, and when she tries to feel him again, he's retreated between the wall he's built so carefully. 

“Ben–” she tries to say, but the words die on her lips when he looks at her again, his face hard and unreadable. 

“This–” he starts, unflinching. “This has nothing to do with me.” 

His eyes look like flames when he brings his gaze back on her. It threatens to burn the heart out of her, the way he looks at her because – because for a split of a second he was the Ben she loved, desperate and pleading, and now he's gone again, and she should be used to see the people she loves disappear, and yet it never stops hurting. 

“Please,” he adds. His voice trembles for a moment, and he sounds genuinely pained, a crack in that perfect façade he’s made out of himself. “I know you don't believe me and you– you have every reason not to, but– I never wanted you dead. It's just– it's for your own good. Everything I did, it was for your own good. I hope you’ll be able to see it one day.” 

It shouldn't make her so _livid_. It's been months and she's supposed to have moved on and it shouldn't be enough to spark a fire within her, and yet. And yet, she's made of burning embers and one quick spark from him is enough to ignite her very being, a conflagration that consumes her. 

It's just – so _unfair_. She's always been on her own, always wary of everyone coming into her life for fear of watching them disappear. She's always been so _good_ – never letting anyone in, never letting anyone see the beating heart underneath her armor, never allowing herself to miss anyone, not even the parents that left her on the side of the street when she was five, terrified of her rising powers. Maybe she hasn't been happy but she's been _safe_ and that, she knows, is all you can ask from this world.

But then Ben had stumbled into her life, all dimpled smiles and flushed ears and those warm, tender eyes that had the unsettling habit of _seeing_ her, as no one had ever seen before, and somehow, between a whispered confession and the other, he'd convinced her it was okay, trusting him. 

But then he left her. 

How could this kind of maddenning pain be for her own good? How could waking up in the morning with a gaping hole in her chest be for her own _good_?

The words send a flare of anger right through her, burning white-hot with fury, and before she knows, she's marching right in his direction in a quick stride. Her hand itches and burns and it's such an easy thing, to summon a fire dancing in her palm, illuminating the darkness around them and chasing the shadows away. 

“Oh, _please_!” she exclaims, sarcastically, letting the light of the fire pour over him, pulling him out of the darkness right into the light. His face looks even sharper like this, a blade honed for a fight. “Spare me the martyr act! My own good! When did you ever _care_ about my own good?”

If Ben is surprised by her sudden anger, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t show _anything_ – and that’s the worst part, she supposes. He just _stands there_ , looking at her, the firelight casting odd shadows on the face she knows so well, and he just doesn’t _react_. She could be screaming, fighting, tearing this whole damn forest apart and setting the world on fire and he would just _look_ at her with those eyes that seem like flames in the darkness and that betray nothing of the agony that is going on beneath their surface.

He looks like a ghost she's conjured into existence just by yearning for him. 

“I did,” he replies, quietly. He looks _tired_ , as if this conversation exhausted him. “I did. Rey– please. I know you don’t believe me, but just– just trust me on this one. _Please_.”

“How could I?” Her voice wavers as the first tears start to fall down her cheeks. She angrily wipes them away before he can notice them. “Was it for my own good even when you betrayed me? Was it for my own good, when you told me you loved me and then you ran to Snoke?”

There it is again – the threatening pull of his own emotions stirring just beneath the calm façade he's struggling to keep on. It feels like an earthquake, deep within the ground beneath her feet – too deep for making her fall down, but enough to shake her. 

“You don't understand,” he says. He works his jaw, his eyes burning from something she can't name, but that makes her heart ache in her chest because how could this go so fucking _wrong_? It was so easy, dancing in her kitchen as they made breakfast in the morning, his arms around her, his lips pressed against her forehead, his magic a safe harbor in this maddening world. “There are things I can't tell you and you don't know the full story–”

“You don't get to tell me I don't understand!” she shouts in the darkness. The flame in her hand flares up in an explosion of unbearable brightness, but she doesn't even notice as she adds, "There’s no full story here to _understand_! You've made yourself perfectly clear when you left and you don't get to spit cryptic warnings and tell me you did it for my own good!”

“If you could believe me for a moment–”

“I _did_! I believed you when you told me you loved me and I trusted you and where has it got me?”

The overbearing grip he has on his magic trembles again, when he shouts, all rage and desperation, “You are alive, aren't you?”

There's a bit of silence after that. Both of them are breathing heavily in the eerie silence of the forest, and their breaths are as loud as cannonballs. They just look at each other for a moment and she can hear the thumping of his heartbeat, a dull sound against his ribcage as he looks at her. There's so much in his eyes, as the firelight shines over him – pain and longing and desperation and it doesn't make any _sense_. 

Her voice breaks this spell when she says, “I don't know what that's supposed to mean.”

He lets out a laugh. It's not an easy sound to listen to – it's not the rumbling, thundering laughter she remembers from their days together, a sound that spilled a golden kind of happiness all around them. Instead, it's a haunting sound, all desperation and sorrow, void of any actual mirth. It's the sound a ghost would make. It feels like this laughter tumbles out of his lips from some place deep and hidden within his soul, tearing his ribcage open in the process because it's clear from his expression, even if not from his weirdly silent magic, that it pains him. 

“It doesn't matter,” he says, then. His voice is faint, barely above a whisper. He shakes his head, softly, when he adds, “You're alive. That's all it matters.”

It dawns on her in this moment, how close she's got in the midst of their fight. She's barely a breath away from him and if she only dared to reach out, she could touch him. She could rest her hand against the place where his heart beats furiously, she could twist her fingers in the soft fabric of his sweater. She could tug him down in a kiss, desperate and hungry and so full of longing she can barely breathe. 

It takes all her strength not to reach for him. Instead, she steps away, shaking her head and hating herself for even falling for this. 

“No. No, fuck this. Fuck this, and you, and your stupid, cryptic warnings,” she murmurs, wiping the last few tears from her face. She clears her throat and works her jaw and takes a deep breath. A chilly wind rises, playing with her hair, moving her clothes. It feels as if she's summoning this kind of merciless storm when she adds, “I curse you.” 

This time, he is surprised. His shock is clearly visible, painted across his guarded feature like a picture she knows too well. He reaches out, his hand hanging in the space between them for a moment, his fingers so close to her arm she feels the ghost of his touch against her skin.

It's the first time he touches her in months. 

It fuels her rage even more. 

“What–” he breathes out, panic rising in his voice. “Rey, what are you doing?” 

“I curse you, Ben Solo,” she repeats, more surely, her voice steady and loud in the forest. Her hands tingle and something pulses along with her heart, a familiar pull that calls to the earth and the stars and everything around her. The wind around her almost resembles a tornado now. “Whatever you love the most in this world– you'll lose it.” Then, with a sad sort of smile, she adds, “It shouldn't be a problem, since you don't seem able to love anything.”

The firelight grazes his face as the words hang in the air for a minute, before he can truly grasp them and then–

She doesn't give herself the time to linger on his reaction. She doesn't look at his horrified face, she doesn't hear his protests, she doesn't turn when he calls her name, his voice a desperate, terrified thing in the growing darkness of the forest behind her. 

She just walks away, feeling oddly defeated. 

✨

The first bruise appears a few days later.

At first, she pays it no mind. She's never been particularly distracted, but she's also not the most mindful person who's ever walked the Earth, and she does tend to bruise easily, so she can write it off as a result of her just being herself. 

She notices it in the shower one night because it hurts when the water hits it directly. It surprises her more than it pains her, but still, her hand comes to turn the shower off and then she studies her arm underneath the harsh neon light of her bathroom, a frown between her eyebrows and her heart beating erratically in her ribcage even if she can't understand why. 

It's no big deal. Just just a little bruise on the side of her arm – purplish-blue against her freckled skin, a little bit sore when she presses her fingers against it. She idly wonders how she got it, because she can't remember an occurrence that might have granted her a bruise, but then she shrugs, proceeds to towel herself off and decidedly does not think about what Ben would say.

Or how he would look at her, with those warm eyes that always seemed to see right through her, and offer to heal it, because he always made it look like taking care of her was a privilege he'd been granted instead of an effort he had to make. 

She huffs out a breath, then wears her oversized sweater and lets the way-too-long sleeves cover the bruise and the memory of Ben both. 

✨

“Hey, what's this?” Finn asks her, as they're setting all the elements for a ritual on the floor of her apartment.

She's sitting cross-legged on her living-room carpet and she's got the sleeves of her hoodie rolled-up to her elbows for practicality as she draws runes on the hardwood floor. She's so engrossed in what she's doing that it takes her a moment to understand what Finn is talking about. 

“What?” she asks him, without looking at him. 

Finn lets out a sigh. “Your arm.” 

She slowly turns into his direction only to find out he's already looking at her, his gaze intent as if he were studying her. Her gaze follows his as it lands on her arm and she sees the bruise she'd noticed a few days earlier. Despite the time that has passed, it's still a violent shade of purple, shining blue and yellow under her living room lights. 

“Oh, that,” she says, dismissively. She waves her hand as if to tell him it doesn't matter, even though Finn looks concerned, his eyes narrowed as he studies the purplish spot on her skin. “Just a little bruise. I must have bumped into something, you know how clumsy I am. Pass me that candle.”

He does, lighting it up with a flick of his fingers and settling it into her open palm, but he still doesn't look convinced. The thing is – he _knows_ her. He's her best friend and he knows her better than she knows herself and he can spot the cracks in her armor so easily it makes her wonder why she even tried to hide them in the first place. His eyes are still trained on her, staring at her as if he were seeing right through the cheerful façade she puts on when he and Rose are around. He probably can, which makes her feel even worse.

It's not like she doesn't want to trust him with her feelings. She knows, rationally, that he cares about her and he would never do anything to hurt her. Finn has been there for her when no one ever was and he's always been some kind of refuge from the storm around her. 

Still, it's hard to trust anyone, after Ben. 

“The thing is–” he starts, softly. His fingers dance around the border of another candle, and he absent-mindedly summons a fire that twirls and twists around his palm in bursts of red and blue. “You've got two other bruises on the other arm.” 

When she looks down at her arms again, she notices the other blue spots she'd missed earlier. A frown takes hold of her face as she studies these new bruises, trying to divine how she got them. When she presses her fingers against the ruined skin, it sends a jolt of pain down her body, sudden and electric. 

She feels almost _dazed_. 

“Oh,” she breathes out. 

Finn, when she finally manages to blink him into focus, is looking at her with such a worried expression that she feels her heart constrict because – she'd almost forgot what it feels like, when someone _loves_ you. 

“Rey,” he murmurs, quietly. His eyes never leave her face, even if she feels by the way his magic trembles that he's fighting the urge to stare at her bruises to make sure she's okay. “Are you… alright?” 

Of course she is. There's nothing wrong with her – she just has a few bruises she probably got while working at Rose's coffee shop, nothing more. And yet, there's a cold, nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach that radiates to every other part of her, dreading and excruciating. It feels like her anxiety usually feels – like there's something deep within her soul, slowly unfurling and wrapping itself around every other part of her until there's nothing left but this suffucating sensation.

She tries to shake it off. “Of course I am,” she replies, scrunching her nose. “It's just a few bruises. Now, stop hoarding all the candles and help me set the circle for the ritual.”

Finn lets out a small exhale, halfway between a sigh and a laugh, and shakes his head. He helps her put the candles all around the runes she's drawn and lights them up with a quick flick of his fingers, in a display of magic that elicits a raised eyebrow out of her. 

“Hey,” he says, then, as he sits beside her. His eyes are watchful of every movement coming from her, as if she could burst into tears any moment now. Sometimes she feels like she could and she doesn't like to be reminded of this haunting possibility. “Do you want me to heal them? I'm not great at healing spells but I could try.”

She knows what he's offering – beside a healing spell, obviously. He's offering her a support, a safe harbor, someone to trust in this barren landscape her life has turned into. Someone who would never betray her. Someone she can put her faith in. Someone who will always be there for her.

“Don't worry, I'll be alright,” she replies, almost automatically. Her magic spell for everything even before she knew how to perform a real spell. Then, before she can think better of it, she rests her head on his shoulder and sighs and lets Finn wrap his magic around her, comforting in the way only her best friend can be. “But thank you.”

His hand travels down to clasp hers and squeezes it. “Don't mention it,” he tells her, fondly. “Come on, let's work on this ritual.”

✨

Her hands tingle with power, a faint golden glow shining under her skin as magic flows through her like a wave that illuminates every part of her being. It's warm and luminous and it feels – like _home_ , even if she's not sure she knows how home is supposed to feel like, anyway.

Still, her power has always been some sort of refuge, the only thing she belonged to in this world, so she supposes it's home, in a way.

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and rests her hand on top of her bruised skin, letting the magic find the place where her skin has broken. It's easy to sense it – the pattern of broken veins underneath her fingers, the magic brushing against the tender skin with the softest touch in an attempt to fix it, flowing into the bruises just like the ocean laps at her feet on the shoreline, softly and delicately. She pours all of herself in it, trying to fix it and when she opens her eyes–

The bruises are still there. 

A sigh escapes her lips and she stares down at her arm, as the soft golden glow of her magic dims down and disappears. Two other bluish spots have appeared right next to the first one she ever noticed and now both of her arms look like a constellation of bruises has scattered on her skin, galaxy-purple against her freckled skin. Her thighs, too, are bruised, even if less prominently. There's a tender spot on the back of her neck, too, even if she can't make sure if it's a bruise or not. 

And she can't seem able to heal any of it. 

She gulps, staring at her ruined skin as if it could grant her an answer. Then, before a wild, frantic panic can take hold of her mind and pull her under, she rolls down the sleeves of her sweater and pretends it never happened. 

She's getting better at that, ever since Ben walked out. 

✨

When the nosebleeds start to happen, she isn't even surprised. At this point, it's hard to ignore the nagging feeling that something is terribly wrong with her and she lets the dread sweep her off her feet, flooding her senses for a few moments as she looks at her reflection in the mirror, bloody nose and fear in the back of her eyes.

It becomes a habit. At some point, the fear recedes and there's only a dull sense of _wrongness_ hanging all over her. She presses a kleenex against her nose until it stops bleeding and then looks at her reflection in the mirror – her skin ghastly white, purple bruises under her eyes, blood on her lips where a few drops have fallen down. The freckles look even darker, against her face, almost a tattoo.

She looks like a ghost. She _feels_ like a ghost. For a moment, she wonders if she is – if floating through this world with no direction and no place to call home can turn you into a haunting presence, devoid of any semblance of life. 

Maybe she'll find out. 

✨

Ben is waiting for her outside her apartment door when she comes home from work one November night. 

The sun has already set, the light of the day disappearing beneath the horizon as the night comes to claim the sky in tendrils of velvet blue, and the moonlight streaming from the building's narrow window paints his stark face in sharp angles, his shadow stretching long and thin like a promise. 

It infuriates her, the way she can recognize him without even having to question it, even like this – even in the approaching darkness, even as she stumbles home tired from work, even after months of silence on his part. She thinks, with a flare of anger that borders onto pain, that she could recognize him in her dreams, in her nightmares, with her eyes closed, with her senses dulled. He's always there, somehow – hanging over her like a _what-if_ she can never get rid of, her own personal haunting story. 

She has no memory of stopping dead in her tracks, but she must have at some point, because he notices her standing there. He turns into her direction and looks at her and nothing is said out loud, but this time–

This time she can _feel_ him. It's a tenuous thing, as if he were trying his best to hide it from her, but she can feel the light brush of his magic against hers, like a phantom touch, a caress when she's already half-asleep. She can feel a hint of the pain eating away at his heart, she can feel a touch of the longing that seems to be choking him as he looks at her, and she can even feel the terrible, monumental effort it takes him to prevent all of these feelings to pour out of him like an overflowing current. 

He's still keeping himself in check and it still hurts, as if he'd closed the door on an intimacy that had been her only fixed point in an uncertain world. She'd never had a home, but the solid warmth of his magic felt like it and now – now she feels as if she were drifting in the world without anything to tether her to this life. 

She gulps, then takes a deep breath and walks the last few steps that divide them. 

“ _Rey_ ,” he breathes out, relief flooding the space between them. 

It surprises her, how much awe and reverence he can put in a single word, and it brings tears to her eyes, because it's not _fair_ , the way he says her name, as if it meant something. As if _she_ meant something, when he discarded her like a toy he'd got bored of.

Last time they'd seen each other, he'd shattered what was left of her broken heart and she'd put a curse on him and it's not– it shouldn't be _allowed_ , this tenderness in his voice when he says her name. She senses a pang of guilt coming from him, sudden and overwhelming, and she wonders if that tenderness had slipped out of him without his permission. 

It makes her feel worse, somehow. 

She busies herself by searching for her keys in the pockets of her coat. It's a small task, easily accomplishable, but she takes her time, just to avoid looking at him in the eyes, too afraid of looking up and seeing the same tenderness on the lines of his face. Or maybe not to see it. She doesn't know which one would be worse.

And yet, even as she doesn't look at him, she can feel the full weight of his gaze on her, as heated and pained and desperate as the feelings currently brewing up a storm underneath the quiet surface of his magic. 

“What do you want?” she tells him, then. Her voice is cold and it betrays nothing of what she's feeling, and yet he must be able to sense it, her pointless struggle against her own heart. She soldiers on as if he couldn't. “If you're here to kill me, could you at least wait until I'm in my apartment? I'd rather die on my carpet than on this dusty rug.”

His voice is as deep and warm as she remembers and she hates it. She hates how easily he can step in and out of her life and make a mess out of her every time. 

“I would never kill you.”

She slides the key into the lock and turns it, her back still turned on him. “Well, you also said you would never leave me and yet, here we are.” The door swings open, but she stays firmly planted on the threshold, for a moment just to feel the heat of his gaze on her. “Forgive me if I don't exactly trust you on your word.”

His breath comes out as a shaky exhale. “I swear on my magic,” he murmurs, softly. His voice sounds torn, desperate and pleading, and it reminds her of the Ben she used to know before he destroyed her world. “I would never kill you.”

It's her turn to let out a deep breath. Then, she steps into her apartment and finally turns to look at him, her gaze flickering between him and her feet. 

“Well?” she asks him, raising her eyebrows. “Are you going to stand there all night?”

It would be easier, she thinks, if she couldn't feel the eagerness hanging all over him, mixed with some kind of longing that she can't define. It's too faint for her to grasp it, and yet it makes her _wonder_ – it makes that foolish hope she tried to suppress soar again in her chest, and she knows he can feel it, even if he says nothing. 

He stays in silence as he follows her inside her apartment and before she can reach for the switch, he's already flicked it and the lights burst into the darkness, blinding her for a moment. This display of familiarity – this reminder of how many nights he's spent in this same apartment, how many times he's flipped the same switch as they entered her living-room, kissing quietly in the shadows and giggling like two teenagers as they stumbled upon her carpet – makes her chest go tight. 

He also closes the door behind himself and it clicks shut with a definitive sound, trapping both of them inside. She can't run away in the forest anymore, she can't just put any more distance between them. 

It's just this silence and their feelings. 

Under the lights of her apartment, she notices he looks – different. Haunting, somehow. He's always been pale, but now he looks like a ghost and his moles stand out darker against his skin, as the violet bruises under his eyes do. His cheekbones are sharper and she wonders if she could cut herself on the lines of his face. His eyes, when his gaze falls on her, still look like flames – but it feels as if the fire in them is slowly dying out. In this kind of merciless light, he looks _exhausted_ and she wonders for a brief moment if he misses her just like she misses him. She also wonders if she looks the same to him – if her face looks just as haunting and terrifying as his does.

She sighs, then divests herself of her coat, letting it fall on her couch, looking away from him as if not to let him notice how his absence has affected her or what is happening to her.

“What do you want, Ben?” she asks, running a hand through her hair just to do something that isn't reaching for him. “I'm tired and I just– you can't keep doing this. You can't keep asking me to meet you or appearing in my life as if nothing had ever happened. It's _unfair_.”

Ben's answer is a defeated sigh, as if it cost him, to let out such a sound. “I know.”

He says it so quietly she doesn't even want to fight him. His exhaustion bleeds into hers, or maybe hers mixes with his – she doesn't know. She's just _tired_. She's bruised and she won't stop bleeding and she can't heal all of this and she feels weak and pathetic and all of this feels so _pointless_. 

That's why, maybe, she blurts out, “It _hurts_.”

It is a pitiful confession – an admission of weakness, a moment of vulnerability and she knows she shouldn't trust him with it, because he's Snoke's right hand now, but he's also _Ben_ and she's tired and she wants to trust him, because he's the only person she's ever trusted in her life and she can't bear to let this – _him_ – go. 

He's so quiet, but his magic speaks. It's a barely-audible murmur, as if he were still trying to keep everything to himself, but she hears the echo of it, in this silence. The pain, the stab in his chest at her admission, the way it physically aches him to see her like this, and she wants to ask him _why_. 

“I never wanted to hurt you. It’s– it’s _killing_ me, Rey,” he admits, then. His voice is soft, as if not to startle her. As if she were a spooked animal he had to reassure. “If you only knew–”

But she doesn't want to _know_. She doesn't think she can take it anymore. 

“I can't do this,” she interrupts him, her voice shaky. “Ben, I can't– I can't do this anymore. Not when you've closed me off and you're working for Snoke and I can't– _you_ can't keep doing this to me. Please. You can't. I just– I'm just so _tired_.”

She doesn't notice she's crying until Ben brings a hand to her face and wipes the tears away with the back of his fingers. It's such a tender gesture she doesn't know how to process it. His magic brims with warmth and tenderness and even–

His lips curve into a sad smile, so devastating it tugs at heartstrings she didn't even know she still possessed. 

“I know,” he repeats. The weariness in his voice is such a deafening sound in this silence and it takes the fight out of her, if she ever got it in her in the first place. “I know. I'm sorry. It is a poor apology for all the hurt I've caused you, but I _am_ sorry. I wish I could take it back.”

And yet, he doesn't let her go. He cradles her face in his hand, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and looks at her, with those eyes that have always seen more than she wanted them to, and he must see it too, the way she trembles underneath his touch, how much she wants him, how much she loves him still. 

It's too much, all of the sudden. This love she feels for him – it's a prison, a curse, something slowly eating away at her soul until there's nothing left.

“Then why are you there?” she asks him, fresh tears falling from her eyes. “Why can't you let this– _me_ go?”

He wipes these tears too, his thumb delicate against her cheek as if he were touching something sacred, then his fingers rest underneath her chin and he slowly, gently tilts her head back so he can look at her.

“I–” His eyes search for hers, his gaze burning the heart out of her. “I just wanted to make sure you're– okay, I suppose. I was worried, after what happened in the forest.”

The hysterical laughter bubbles in her throat, but she swallows it down, even though some kind of noise must slip past her lips, because Ben looks at her, a concerned frown on his familiar, yet different face. 

“Okay?” she repeats, as if she could make sense of the word like this. “No, Ben, I am not _okay_. You were the first person who I trusted enough to love and let myself be loved and then– Then you left without an explanation and joined the man who wants to _destroy_ us and– was something I said or did? Was I that _unlovable_ that you had to work for someone who is actively trying to end my life?”

The pain is a palpable thing, hanging in the space between them. She doesn't know if it's coming from him or from her, but it rises up in a crescendo of desperation and it tugs at her heart in such a hurtful way. She feels new tears fall down her cheeks and he wipes them with his fingers, so fucking _gently_ still, as if he weren't her very enemy right now. 

“Rey,” he exhales. His eyes are as haunting as the rest of him, burning in his face like a flame that will, inevitably, turn her into ashes. “Rey, you're not unlovable. You are the only person I could ever love.”

That's all he says, but the magic – oh, it comes to her both like a knife and like a balm to soothe the wound. He's trying his best to keep it from her but she senses it all the same – the warmth, the sense of belonging, the utter and content happiness of those lyrical months before he changed his mind and walked away. 

“Then why?” she asks him, and really, wouldn't it be nice if there was a reason she could understand? She feels like a kid – like the kid she was, at some point in her life, asking for a simple explanation in a world of complicated matters. “Why did you have to go and join Snoke? I don't– I don't _understand_ ”

His other hand comes to rest on the place where her neck meets her shoulder and – God, his hands are so warm and gentle and his touch is so familiar and it fucks her up, the idea that he's still her Ben, looking at her with tears in his eyes as she talks. 

“I never meant for this to happen,” he says instead of answering her question, his voice barely above a whisper. 

She laughs again, the sound barely registering in her mind. “What part? Loving me or breaking my heart?”

His hand travels up to cup the side of her face and Ben – he looks at her as if he never wanted to look at anything else. As if she were a whole universe he wanted to lose himself into. The fire in his eyes burns brightly now and he looks like something ethereal and otherworldly, a will-o-wisp that will lead her astray. 

“I hate that I hurt you so much you have to _ask_ ,” he murmurs, softly. Underneath his voice there's a whole universe of meaning threatening to spill over, and yet he says it so _quietly_ , barely a whisper in this silence. “Rey. I don't regret loving you. I will never regret it. You– you brought light in a universe of darkness. Loving you– that's the best part of my life.”

Later, she will wonder what did it. If it was the way his eyes lingered on her, warm and sincere and full of a love that she's always felt so hungry for ever since she was a kid. Or maybe if it was his words, the way he'd slipped into a present tense that made her feel so hopeful for the first time in months. Or maybe it was the simple, undeniable fact that she missed him, so much it felt as if someone had cut out a part of her own heart. 

Right now, she doesn't know. But it's almost as if something possessed her, as if she'd been put under a spell, as she places a hand on his chest, twists her fingers into the soft fabric of his sweater and tugs him down into a kiss. 

It's – it's like fireworks beneath her skin, like the sudden flow of blood in a numb limb, like something that presses down her chest and prevents her from breathing. Like the first time she'd done magic – power flowing through her, twisting around her fingers, lingering in her hands, terrifying and magnificent at the same time. 

It's painful and bruising and desperate.

And she loves it. 

There's no space for hesitation. Ben lets out a sigh against her lips and kisses her back immediately, as if he'd been waiting for this moment all this time, and he kisses her as if he were starving and desperate, as if he were begging her with no words. His magic is like a wave, crashing on her, and there's no control in it anymore – feelings slip past his awareness, mixing with hers, swelling and flowing in the space between their souls. One of his hands tilts her head backward so he can deepen the kiss while the other travels down, resting at the small of her back in a warm, reassuring touch that finally grounds her again to this life, this moment, this _home_. She's alive – she's not a ghost or a haunting presence, but she's flesh and blood and she's kissing him, and Ben is kissing her back, and it feels like coming home.

It's hungry, so full of yearning and pain and rage and love it makes a mess out of her heart. And it's _perfect_. 

But then, he brings her closer, as if afraid she could disappear, and his fingers dig into her back, right where her skin is bruised and she can't help but _gasp_ into the kiss, the pain sudden and unexpected, like a flare of blinding light. 

He notices, of course. He's always noticed everything about her – as if he could truly _see_ her, as if he were attuned to her very soul, sensing the changes before she could notice them. 

He steps away from her, his hand hovering around her waist and a concerned look on his face as he stares at her. “Are you okay?”

She nods, twists her fingers in his sweater again as if she wanted to prevent him from ever leaving again, before he can think better of this, before she sees reason, before reality catches up on them. 

“I'm fine,” she replies, even if her voice is faint and weak and she hates herself for it. 

Ben doesn't miss it, of course. He brings both of his hands on her face, tilting it back a bit so he can look into her eyes, as if he could understand her like this. As if he could read her face, her body, her own existence in the back of her eyes. His magic trembles around him in waves of panic. 

“Are you sur–”

The words die on his lips as he looks at her. Before she can ask him anything, a horrified expression spreads on his face and he just _stares_ at her, as if he were witnessing something terrible. His hands tremble, there where are pressed against her skin. 

She frowns, confused. “What is it?” she asks. “Ben? Are you alright?”

He doesn't look like he's able to say anything, but she doesn't need him to answer because it becomes apparent the moment blood starts to drip, in small droplets, down to her carpet. It makes a dull sound, in this eerie silence around them. 

She brings a hand to her nose and it comes away red, smeared with blood. 

Her mouth opens, but she doesn't get to say anything, because her vision blacks out and she falls.

The last thing she hears is Ben, desperate, screaming her name.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as usual, i'm blown away by all your kind words and your reactions to this fic!! thank you so much for everything, you make my days brighter and lighter with all your constant support ♥
> 
> i'll leave you to the fic and remember, this is going to have a happy ending and they're going to be alright ♥

Her first awareness, when the black veil lifts from her consciousness, is of strong arms supporting her. 

There’s something frantic, pulsing all around her like a second heartbeat. It drowns all other sounds, growing wilder and wilder until she can’t focus on anything else but this feeling, this glowing red light in the darkness that seems to absorb all her scattered thoughts. It threatens to spill over her like a devastating wave, pulling her under until all she can breathe is _this_.

It takes her a few minutes to realize that it’s coming from Ben. It takes her even more to understand that it’s pure _panic_. 

“Rey,” he’s saying, a feverish quality about his voice. “ _Rey_.”

It sounds as if he’s been whispering her name over and over again for quite sometimes now, because he keeps murmuring it as if it were an enchantment, as if it could protect him – _her_? – from all evils. His hand tenderly cradles the back of her head, while his arm rests at her middle, holding her, preventing her from falling down. 

“Rey, please, talk to me. Can you hear me?” He doesn’t give her the time to formulate an answer and she isn’t sure she’d be able to anyway. Words feel like something out of reach, in her nebulous state of mind. “Please. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”

_I’ve always been here_ , she wants to say, bitterly. _You’re the one who left_. 

She’s vaguely aware of her surroundings. Things are happening both too fast and too slowly for her mind to catch on them – it feels as if her brain had started to function at a different speed from the rest of the world around her, her body sluggish and limp and useless in Ben’s arms, and though she knows that something _is_ happening, she can’t quite understand it. 

The panic pulsing in the darkness doesn’t make it any easier. 

Suddenly, something – _Ben, it feels like Ben_ – sweeps her off her feet and she feels as if she were floating on a cloud, her body unbearably light in his arms. She can hear his heartbeat pressed right against her and her head lolls against his shoulder when he gently carries in his arms and places her on something soft and warm. 

She drifts in and out of consciousness in waves. 

Even as his arms leave her, his warmth doesn’t. His fingers brush the hair out of her forehead, his magic embraces her as if to shield her. It hits her in this moment, the realization that he isn’t shutting her out anymore – the panic has blasted that door open and now the feelings pour in a wave that threatens to drown her.

Fear. Panic. Guilt. _Tenderness_. All of them whirling around him like a storm.

She has to – no, she _wants_ to reach out for him. Her voice sounds raspy and faint, when, fighting against the fog currently occupying her mind, she calls for him. 

“Ben?”

Relief floods the space between their souls and he lets out a choked sob that makes her chest go terribly tight. 

“ _Rey_ ,” he repeats, as if her name were the only word to hold any semblance of meaning in the universe. He lets out a watery laugh, before adding, “Fuck, Rey. You scared the hell out of me.”

It takes her a tremendous effort to open her eyes, but when she does, Ben swims into focus in small details – the warmth of his gaze, the unshed tears in his eyes, the hesitant curve of his smile, the way his hands linger mid-air as if wanting to touch her but not knowing if he’s allowed to. 

His face is open and vulnerable again now that he isn’t hiding behind a wall anymore and there’s so much–

So much _love_. 

She doesn’t understand it. 

Maybe she did hit her head as she fell, because it doesn’t make any sense for him to love her _now_. 

“What can I say,” she murmurs, scrunching her nose and pretending everything is fine, which is her standard reaction when something happens. “Your kiss was so good it made me weak in the knees.”

Ben lets out another watery laugh, his cheeks dimpling. She can see the hint of his crooked teeth like this and her heart jolts in her chest. He looks so much like the man she loves it’s hard to remind herself he’s not that man anymore. Especially when he stares at her like _that_.

“I can see you’re feeling better,” he says, still so softly, his hand coming to brush her hair out of her clammy forehead again. 

She’s lying down on her couch, she notices. Ben is kneeling right next to her, on the floor – he’s shed his coat, his hair is a mess of tangled curls, and there’s dried blood on his hands and sweater. 

He notices her staring at it, because he sighs and pulls a bit away, probably mistaking her dread for repulsion. 

“I tried to heal it. Your nosebleed,” he explains, gently. It is an age-old instinct, the one that compels him to avert his eyes and bring a hand to the back of his neck, anxiously rubbing it. “But it wouldn’t– it just wouldn’t work. Maybe I was too scared and it messed up with my focus.”

She idly wonders what he was so scared for. For all she knows, he should rejoice in her demise, shouldn’t he? He works for Snoke, after all. Just because he’d sworn on his magic he would never kill her, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t find the idea of her death a wonderful possibility.

Raising herself to a sitting position takes her all her strength, but she does it anyway, even if Ben fusses over her, helping her, his hands warm on her back, his arms strong and solid as they wrap around her body. It doesn’t make any sense, but if she leans a little bit more in his touch before he moves away, she can’t be blamed, can she? 

It’s her only chance, after all. Tomorrow, he’ll be gone and this night will be just a painful memory. One of many.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with panic. You probably wouldn’t have been able to heal me even with perfect focus,” she tells him, then, as her gaze falls on the blood still on his hands. Then, she takes a deep breath before admitting, for the first time, “There’s something wrong with me.”

He frowns, his gaze fixed on her. “What do you mean?”

Somehow, she feels even more vulnerable than she already is with his arms around her body to support her. Admitting such a weakness – that’s _terrifying_. She’s always been strong even in the face of danger and trusting someone else with her vulnerability and her humanity is the scariest act of her life. Especially when Ben has burned her before.

Her heart beats a wild tattoo against her chest, pulsing with incandescent panic that reverberates in her magic, and it doesn’t stop fluttering as she rolls up the sleeves of her sweater, baring her bruised skin to the fluorescent lights of her apartment and to Ben’s intent, burning gaze. 

It startles a gasp out of him. 

“I haven’t been able to–” she starts, her fingers tracing the outline of one of her bruises, careful not to touch it. “To heal anything, really. The fainting is new, but all the rest– the bruises, the nosebleeds… well. You can see it for yourself.”

She doesn’t look at him. It’s somehow easier this way, because she doesn’t have to meet his concerned gaze, and yet, it’s impossible to pretend he isn’t here. His emotions are a storm in this tiny living-room, an explosion behind her closed eyelids. 

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. This silence feels even worse – poignant, tense in a way their silences never were. She wonders what he’s thinking about – if he feels sorry for her. If he’s worried. If he even _cares_. 

The silence breaks the moment he lets out another choked sob. 

When she raises her eyes to look at him, surprised, a horrified expression is spreading on his face and there are _tears_ in his eyes. 

“Fuck,” he breathes out before she can say anything. “Fuck, _fuck_.” He raises to his feet and starts to pace around the living room, his hands in his hair, his voice wavering, even if she can’t tell if from anger or pain or fear. “I thought– fuck, you were fine and you were _alive_ and– I thought it hadn’t worked. I thought you’d fucked it up with your choice of words. I thought– _Fuck_.”

Then, he abruptly turns into her direction and stares at her, desperate and terrified, his magic quivering around him like restless energy, a distortion in the fabric of reality. 

His voice is half agony, half rage when he asks her, “Why would you do this to yourself?”

She’d thought she was too tired to be angry – her body feels weak, spent as if all her energy had dribbled out of her like blood from a wound. And yet, she feels her anger flare up like a barely contained fire and now she’s _burning_.

She knew it was a mistake, to trust him with her vulnerability. He discarded it the first time around, why would things be different now? 

“What do you mean?” she asks him, hardening her features and squaring her shoulders, swallowing down her own vulnerability. “How can this be _my fault_?”

He lets out a laugh, halfway between shock and pain. 

“You don’t _realize_ ,” he says, aghast. He runs a hand through his hair, his face red and blotchy and striked with tears as he _looks_ at her. There’s some sort of dread hanging all over him, like a cape draped all over his soul, and it comes as a choking sensation to her, pressing down on her own throat like cruel, remorseless fingers. “All of this– it must have been happening for a while now. You’ve been dealing with this for what, a month? And you still don’t _see_ it, do you?”

Her fury is a conflagration, burning brighter than any fire she’s ever summoned. 

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “Please, if you’re so smart, tell me what’s happening to me, since apparently I’m too dumb to understa–”

“You _cursed_ me!”

His words are a shout, torn out of him. They’re raw, drenched in pain and desperation, and they hang suspended in the air for a moment as if they were a curse in their own right. 

He stops pacing around, standing in front of her with his towering height and trembling, heaving shoulders and for a moment everything stills, as if time had stopped and the world had disappeared and there was nothing in the universe but the two of them. 

But then he sinks to his knees again and he–

He buries his face into her lap and breaks down into tears. 

It’s a terrible, heart-wrenching thing, the sight of this broad-shouldered man folding himself so that he can rest his head in her lap and just _cry_ _his heart out_. It’s a desperate sort of crying, the sort of crying that feels as if the sobs were tearing your ribcage apart and breaking your heart as they slip past your lips, and Rey feels, for the first time in her life, powerless in front of his pain. 

There’s no spell or enchantment that she can cast. There’s no place she can run away to, either. 

There’s just Ben, desperately crying into her lap, and the sorrow that radiates from him, like venom oozing from poisoned lips. 

“You–” he hiccups between sobs. “You cursed me.”

An old instinct – one that never really went away – resurfaces and she brings her hand to his head, running her fingers through his hair to soothe him, just like he did to her when they were together. His hair is just as soft as she remembers and flows between her fingers like water.

He only cries harder at that. 

There’s so much pain in the scene unfolding in front of her that she feels her rage burn out of her almost immediately, as if he’d thrown icy water on that bright fire burning deep within her. Instead, a cold dread settles in its place, making her stomach churn. 

“Ben,” she murmurs, keeping her voice low as if not to startle him. This time, he’s the spooked animal she doesn’t want to scare away. “Ben, I don’t understand.”

It takes him a few seconds to raise his head and when he does, the sight in front of her is enough to make her heart still in her chest for a moment that feels like a small eternity. 

He looks – _wrecked_. 

His eyes are red and full of tears. She’s known him for almost a year and yet, she’s never seen him like this – completely _undone_ , as if she’d just torn him into pieces. His face is desperate and there’s so much _pain_. In his gaze. In his magic. Hanging all over him like a shadow. 

Then, his lips curve into a sad, hopeless smile. “Remember the curse you put on me?”

As if she could ever forget. 

She nods, softly, even though she can’t follow his train of thought. 

“Yeah,” she replies. “You’d end up losing whatever you loved the most.”

He looks at her, still, amber eyes full of indescribable sorrow, when he whispers, “Yeah.”

She frowns, confused. “I don’t understa–”

The painfully obvious realization hits her all of the sudden, like a knife to her heart. It steals the air out of her lungs, makes her heart miss a bit for a second, and she can’t do anything but stare at him for a while, her eyes wide and her lips parted, as if to say words she doesn’t even remember. 

She’s _dying_ , she realizes. And she’s dying because–

“Ben,” she breathes out, too shocked to say anything else. 

She can sense the moment he realizes she’s finally understood, because he averts his eyes and wipes his tears with the back of his hand and just _doesn’t look at her_. Guilt and fear and horror curl around him in a painful mix, twisting the knife he’s just buried in her heart. 

“Yeah,” he replies, once again.

She wonders if that’s the only word he remembers. 

“ _Ben_ ,” she repeats , more forcefully this time, and slightly tugs at his hair to force him to look at her. He does, his eyes speaking for him even when he doesn’t say a word. “You _love_ me.”

The mere thought sounds ridiculous – she’s spent the last few months thinking he hadn’t loved her in a long time, if he ever loved her at all, and now he’s here and he’s looking at her with those burning eyes, and he’s telling her he loves her, present tense, and that’s why she’s _dying_ and it’s all too much. 

She doesn’t think there’s a chance she can process all of this. 

Ben just looks at her, his face both soft and pained and he looks at her the way he used to when they were together – as if the universe started and ended on the curve of her smile, on the pattern of freckles on her face, on the hazel of her irises – and it doesn’t _make sense_ at all. 

Then, he lets out a shuddering breath. 

“I do,” he admits. His voice is deep and low, a whisper against the sudden silence in her apartment, a caress against her bruised heart. Then, he slowly reaches for her hand, still lost in his hair, and brings it back to his face, planting a kiss on her palm, closing his eyes for a moment as if to process all of this, too. “I love you. I’m so sorry, Rey. I’m so fucking sorry.”

✨

It takes her a moment to recover.

It feels as if her world had been just turned upside down and everything in her life had been rewritten in the light of this confession and now it’s up to her to make sense of all of it and she can’t, because there’s just _too much_ to deal with. 

Ben doesn’t rush her, doesn’t ask anything of her, least of all her forgiveness. He just looks at her, in silence, his lips pressed to her palm. 

Now that the controlling grip of his magic has disappeared, it flows freely between them. It’s not a murmur anymore, but the familiar conversation she remembers from their time together. It wraps around her body like a safe, warm embrace and there’s so much _love_ in it – desperate, hopeless, terrible, overwhelming love, that threatens to both undo her and make her whole again. 

She can’t understand it. It can’t be possible because – because he _left_ her. She loved him and trusted him and he left her anyway, just like her parents had when they’d found out their daughter could summon fire in her hands. 

How many blows a heart can withstand, until it’s broken beyond repair? And how can you even mend a shattered heart?

“But–” she starts, her voice faint and small. She wants to scream. She wants to shake him. She wants to tear the whole world apart and burn it to the ground, but instead she looks at him, tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. Her heart makes a dull sound in her chest as it flutters, erratically. “ _Why_?”

He closes his eyes for a moment, as if he expected this question and dreaded it at the same time. His lips part, but for a moment nothing comes out of it, except for a shuddering breath that seems to wreck his whole body. 

“Would you believe me if I told you it was for your own good?” he asks her, then.

The words rekindle the flame of her rage, for a moment. She glares at him. “I heard that before.”

He comes to cover her hand with his and intertwines their fingers and it feels – so uneventfully easy, as if they had never stopped loving each other, as if they hadn’t spent months apart, as if he hadn’t broken her heart and she hadn’t cursed him, signing her own demise in the process. 

As if they lived in a universe in which things were so utterly simple. 

“I wasn’t lying,” he says. His voice is resigned, tired. Exhausted. “All of this–” He gulps, guilt and horror rolling off of him. “It was to protect you.”

There’s still blood on his sweater, on his hands. Probably on her face too. Her blood. She doesn’t know why she fixates on it, but it seems easier to stare at the traces of dried blood instead of his dear, anguished face. 

“You _broke my_ _heart_ to protect me?” she asks, incredulous. “How– How can you even look at me and say that? You made me feel _unloved_. I thought–” It’s hard, speaking through the sobs that are fighting their way out of her lips, but she tries anyway. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I can never make anyone _stay_ and _love me_ and it was _awful_ and _–_ How can this be for my own _good_ , I don’t– I really can’t–" 

She doesn’t realize Ben is climbing up the couch until he’s there, cupping her face into his hands, wiping the tears away, being _here._ Here, where she needed him months ago. His magic is real and warm against her, wrapping her in its safety, and she feels at _home_ and she can’t help but sob at the thought. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, raw and intense as always, his feelings bleeding into his voice. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

And it’s like a dam bursts open because she breaks down in sobs and she can’t do anything but climb into his lap, bury her face into the crook of his neck and _cry_. She cries for the months she’s spent missing him, for all the nights she fell asleep with her arms around her middle just to feel a spark of warmth in her body, for the times she thought of something funny to share with him and turned into his direction to tell him but found only an empty spot on her couch instead. She cries for those moments in which she’d wondered if she was so impossible to love. 

It feels as if she never stops crying. 

Ben runs a hand up and down her back in soothing circles, presses a kiss to the top of her head, holds her through it. His hands are warm and their heat seeps through her bones, and she’d never realized how cold she’d been until she finds herself wrapped in his embrace. 

When her sobs ebb and she feels spent and tired and she can’t do anything else but rest, limp, against his chest, he finally tells her, “It was either that or watching you die.”

The words sound so definitive in this silence. 

She pulls away from him just to look into his eyes, studying his familiar face. “What do you mean?”

His hand comes to brush a few hair out of her forehead, then wipes away the tears that are still lingering on her cheeks. He does it so gently and slowly, as if terrified by the idea that she could somehow stop him. 

“Snoke threatened me,” he explains. His voice is low and calm, but there’s a quiet sort of rage coming from him, his magic trembling around him like an earthquake, rising from deep within his soul. "I never told you– He’s been after me ever since I was a child. He’s been in my head for as long as I remember.”

His words rewrite months and months of her life, turning them into something different, and she can’t help but frown. “What? Why didn’t you tell me? I–” _I told you everything about me_ , she wants to say, but the words die on her lips.

He sighs, letting out a shaky breath. “It’s– complicated.” His fingers come to smooth the frown taking hold of her face, tenderly as if he were handling something precious. “It’s not because I didn’t trust you. It’s just– I didn’t know if you’d believe me.” He looks like a frightened child, eyes full of terror, when he adds, “No one ever believed me when I was a kid. My family– they dismissed it. It wasn’t out of cruelty, I know, they were just… busy. But it hurt. I couldn’t bear it if you refused to believe me, too.” 

Her heart twists in her chest. He looks so unbearably young like this that she feels her chest go tight and she wishes she could cast a spell to go back in time and believe him when it mattered.

“Ben,” she breathes out, his name falling so easily from her lips even after months of pretending to forget it. “Of course I would have believed you.”

“I know that now.” He swallows, nervously. He trembles in her arms, when she brings a hand to his face to stroke his hair and there’s disbelief in his eyes as he watches her soothe him. As if he didn’t think himself worthy of it. “It’s just– it’s hard to trust your instincts, when you have a voice in your head telling you everyone you’ve ever loved doesn’t actually care about you.”

It breaks her already shattered heart. She runs her hand through his hair, slowly, letting all her love and tenderness pour over him, washing away the bitterness of his childhood, the horror of his adolescence, the sorrow of these past few months.

“I care.” Her words are a whisper, but she might as well have shouted them, because he jolts as if she’d burned him. As if she’d cursed him again. “I care,” she repeats, for good measure. 

Ben presses his lips together and works his jaw, the way he always does, she’s learned, when he feels vulnerable and overwhelmed. He huffs out a breath, then, shaking like a leaf, and his magic quivers around him, like a frightened creature.

“Thank you. For saying that.” His hands tremble, there where they come to rest on her hips. “I know I don’t deserve it, after everything I’ve done.”

She lets out a deep breath and her eyes flutter closed for a moment, as if to absorb this whole situation in front of her, complicated as it is. Then, she blinks him in again.

“What happened?” she asks, the question that had been on the tip of her tongue for months now.

He inhales and squares his shoulders as best as he can, as if to prepare himself for a fight. It makes her heart clench in her chest.

“I’ve been trying to get rid of him for my whole life. It never worked for long, he found a way to get to me in the end. It happened again a few months ago. At first I was sure I could ignore him or– I don’t know. It was nothing new, after all. I’ve dealt with his voice in my head all my life. But then, when he found out about _you_ , everything got so fucked up. He– He offered me a choice. Either I joined him or you died.” Then, he raises his eyes to look at her, agony in the warm amber of his gaze. “You can see it wasn’t much of a choice at all.”

“You could have told me,” she tells him, then. Her hand comes to trace his features – his sharp cheekbones, the dark shadows under his eyes, the hint of stubble against his jawline – as if she wanted to make sure she hasn’t conjured him into existence by longing for him. “I could– I could have helped you. You didn’t have to deal with it– with _him_ on your own.”

He leans into her touch, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment as if to _feel_ it. Her fingers linger on the outline of his lips and he kisses her fingertips, softly. 

“You would have died.” His voice is so faint she barely hears him. “Even if you’d believed me, you would have died. Rey, he’s– he’s been hunting me ever since I could remember. He’s–” He shudders underneath her, a tremor running through him and his magic at the same time. It speaks of a terror so big it engulfs everything else, eating away at his soul until there’s only this fear left. “I just wanted you to be _safe_. I had put you in danger by loving you, the least I could do was protect you from any harm, including from myself." 

She feels fresh tears in her eyes at the thought. “But you could have _told_ me,” she repeats, petulant as a child. 

“And risk your life?” He opens his eyes to look at her, his face so painfully sad her heart aches in her chest. “Would you have done it if the tables were turned? Knowing that any word coming from you could have endangered me?”

_No_ , she realizes. No, she would not bear to put him in danger and yet – she can’t believe she would surrender either, not without fighting. But she senses it, the exhaustion leaking from him – he’s been fighting his whole life. She couldn’t ask more out of him. 

If only she’d known. If only he’d told her. If only things had been easier and simpler.

“I made Snoke swear on his magic that you wouldn’t be harmed,” he continues. “Swearing on your magic, that’s binding but– I didn’t fully trust him not to weasel his way out of it, so I tried to warn you. That night in the forest. It didn’t go that well?”

She shakes her head. “But you didn’t have to _break my heart_.”

He winces at her words, the pain radiating from him like a wave that pulls her under, and yet the memory of these past few months is still too fresh, too raw to let it go. It feels pointless to be still angry at him when she doesn’t even know how much time she’s left to live, and yet she can’t help to.

“You didn’t have to–” She shakes her head, wondering how to convey how earth-shattering his absence had been – and still is – for her. “You didn’t have to make me feel _unloved_.”

His hand comes to run up and down her back, in soothing patterns. 

“That was my mistake,” he replies. “I thought– I thought if I could grant you a clean break, you’d move on. That maybe you’d end up hating me, but at least you’d end up _alive_. Maybe you’d even move out of this town and you’d be safe. But you–” His lips curve into another smile, so sad and devastating. “You’ve always been unpredictable. That’s what I love about you, even when it breaks my heart.”

It tears a choked chuckle out of her. She doesn’t know what she’s laughing at – maybe at her own foolishness, or at the absurdity of this situation, she can’t tell. But it feels that’s all her mind is capable of at the moment. 

“You surely didn’t expect me to hate you so much I’d end up cursing you.”

His eyes are impossibly tender and pained and for the first time in this whole night she believes he loves her because– 

Because he looks as if he were ready to tear his heart out of his chest just to grant hers another beat. It’s crushing, the weight of his stare. It makes her little doomed heart thunder in her chest.

“Definitely not.” His hands tug gently at her sweater so that she slides closer, as if he wanted to merge their souls, their magic, their bodies. His lips are warm against her hairline, when he presses a kiss and the next few words there. “When you cursed me I– I was horrified. I knew all at once that the curse would backfire on you because–”

He gulps, a mix of guilt and love and regret rolling off of him. He looks at her and the words die on his lips, as if there weren’t words in the English language that could convey all that he’s feeling right now.

“Because I’m the thing you love the most in this world,” she finishes, her voice barely above a whisper. 

She feels almost – _guilty_ , saying it. As if she weren’t allowed. As if she weren’t allowed to be loved so much by someone. As if love was a privilege reserved for someone else – not the kid who got left behind because of who she was. 

“Yes,” he says, without missing a beat. “Because you’re the thing I love the most in the world,” he repeats, gently, as if to remind her that yes, she’s worth of love, even when this love comes with a death sentence hanging over her. “So I grew desperate. I tried to get Snoke off my back everytime I could so I could keep tabs on you. I even– fuck, I even asked Rose and Finn about you.”

There must be a limit to the amount of shocking things she has to learn in a single night, but apparently Ben isn’t aware of it so all she can do at his confession is blink at him in disbelief. 

“You _what_?” And then, because realization strikes all at once, “Fuck. That’s why Finn was so worried. Because _you_ made him worry.”

He shrinks into his shoulders – his signature move everytime he tries to save himself from the inevitable embarrassment that often follows his words. It always tugs at her heart, the sight of this giant of a man, trying to make himself smaller as if he could disappear like this.

“Yeah. They– they weren’t very pleased to see me, especially Finn.” 

He lets out a shuddering breath, by which she can easily imagine the gist of their conversation. 

“But from the way they talked about you, you seemed to be fine. Of course, you were hurting but you were _alive_ so I just thought– maybe the wording was wrong or weird and the curse hadn’t worked. Still, I just wanted to check on you once, to make sure that you were alright. So–” He presses his lips together, shrinks even more into his shoulders. “Here I am.”

It feels like the beginning of the night belongs to another century – finding Ben outside her door, inviting him in, kissing him, it all seems like a memory from a lifetime ago.

Her lips curve into a tired smile. “And then I fainted into your arms right after kissing you.”

She can sense the moment his heart drops, even if he tries not to show it. “Yeah,” he breathes out. Then, he goes for a tentative smirk which resembles more a grimace than anything else. “It wasn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for.”

It tears a weary laughter out of her. Then, she sinks back into his embrace, burying her head into the crook of his neck again. His sweater is still a bit damp from her tears, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Instead, he wraps his arms around her and presses a kiss to her temple and lets his magic wash over her like gentle fingers running up and down her back in a soothing gesture. 

They stay in silence for a moment, as if to let the reality of this settle in. There’s so much more she wants to tell him, still, but she doesn’t know where to begin from and would it really matter, in the end? They’d still be stuck there, in this impossible situation, time slipping through their fingers like sand.

Still. 

It matters to _her_. 

“I wouldn’t have gotten so hateful and angry if you’d just given me an explanation,” she tells him, then, pulling slightly away from him to look him in the eyes. There’s so much regret there that she feels it as if it were a living thing, sitting on this couch right next to them, an unwanted guest on their precious night. “But you didn’t and when you left, it brought out all my worst fears.”

“I know.” He wipes away a tear that she hadn’t realized she’d shed. “I know and I hated myself for it. I’ll never forgive myself for the hurt I’ve caused you and I’ll never ask you to forgive me, either. But at least I could tell myself you were _alive_.”

She doesn’t tell him the past few months she’s spent without him have been a half-life anyway. Instead, she takes a deep breath and the words leave her lips in a breathless sigh. 

“And now I’m dying anyway.”

His face hardens, his hands tighten their grip on her, as if preventing her from slipping through his fingers. As if he could turn this whole curse around just with his stubbornness. 

“No.” 

She raises her eyebrows. “No?” she repeats, as if she could give a different meaning to the word. “Ben, there’s no way you can change things. I fucked up. _We_ fucked up. I’m–” She stares at the dried blood on his sweater, on his hands. Remembers the way her vision had blacked out. Panic rises in her chest like a wave, dragging her under. There’s something frantic, fearful in her voice when she admits, “I’m _dying_.”

He grits his teeth, his own magic trembling, crackling around them like a storm. Electricity runs down her back, there where his hands are resting. “You’re _not_.” 

“Ben.” 

“No.” His voice is harsh, but ragged, as if he were trying his best to keep the sobs at bay. “No. I won’t let you.”

Her hands tremble when she comes to cradle his face and she shakes like a leaf as she rests her forehead against his. 

It’s so fucking _unfair_. After all she’s been through, after all she’s survived to get where she is now – she’s _dying_ because Ben _loves_ her. That’s not _fair_. That’s not how the story goes. 

“Ben,” she almost _pleads_. “We both know the only way to break a curse is to kill the person who cursed you. Which is awfully convenient, since I’ll probably be dead in a few weeks.”

“No,” he repeats, a spell against all evil, his voice wavering and trembling, tears falling from his eyes. “No, I won’t let it happen. There must be another way.”

His magic pushes against her, a wave that drowns her into an abyss of despair. It chokes her and it mixes up with her own pain and rage as he brings her down in a fierce, bruising kiss.

He doesn’t hold back – he kisses her as if it were their last kiss, as if the world were crumbling all around them and they only had this minute, this chance, this moment suspended in time. The kiss is deep and hard and demanding – his hands leave an imprint on her hips, the only bruises she’ll ever cherish. She sinks her own hands into his hair, tangles her fingers into his curls, tugs at them to bring him closer. Their breaths are mingled, their bodies a twist of intertwined limbs, their heartbeats pressed right against each other. Their magic is both a question and an answer, rising like the final, heartbreaking note of a symphony. 

When he breaks away, he looks at her, eyes like a forest fire on his stern face. He breathes heavily against her lips when he tells her, “I’m not going to let you die.”

It’s so easy to believe him, when he’s holding onto her so tightly, as if she were the only thing that made sense in a vast, complicated universe. Even if she knows it’s pointless.

“I am going to twist the Earth and the sky and everything in between to keep you alive,” he continues, his magic lighting up a matching fire within her chest, too. “I am going to bend the universe to my will if it comes to it but I won’t let you die.”

He takes her face into his hands and plants another kiss to her lips, a little less fierce, a little more loving. 

“I love you,” he murmurs, softly, as if he were telling her the deepest secret of his heart. “I won’t let you die because of it.”

✨

Ben cleans the blood from her face with the utmost care, as if he were handling something incredibly precious. He helps her on the bathroom counter as if she weighted nothing to him, tilts her head back with his fingers and brushes a damp towel under her nose, gently, looking her in the eyes the whole time. 

It’s a slow, tender, _intimate_ process and he makes it look almost like an act of worship. The love he feels for her is palpable – not only in his magic, but in the way he looks at her, in the way his lips curve into a sad smile every time he catches her gaze, in the way his hand cups her face. 

She feels so loved it’s hard to put it down into words. It’s more like a golden warmth flooding her chest, making her feel cherished. Important. _Wanted_. She wants to bask in this feeling for as long as she’s left to live. 

Which might not be long. 

“What about Snoke?” she asks him, all of the sudden, as if remembering something. He frowns, confused, so she adds, “Won’t he notice you’re gone? Won’t he know you’re–” She gestures vaguely to her bathroom. “–here?”

She expects his frown to deepen, to see his lips curve in a bitter grimace. Instead, he lets out a rumbling laughter that reminds her of simpler times and that makes her look at him in disbelief, because, try as she might, she can’t find anything remotely funny in this situation. Maybe this whole mess has finally taken a toll on him and he’s starting to unravel.

“Well,” he starts, when his laughter ebbs. “I like to think he’s now wondering why he can’t even summon a simple fire.”

This time, it’s her turn to frown. “What?”

His eyes are still burning, a kind of savage joy in the back of those amber irisis she knows so well. It’s bitter, harsh. Raw and intense in a way only Ben knows how to be.

“I made him swear on his magic that you wouldn’t be harmed,” he reminds her. His gaze falls down on the cloth currently resting in his hand, where her blood paints a crimson picture against the white fabric. “You can see the problem.”

She gapes at Ben for a moment, staring at him blankly. Her mind feels on the verge of exploding and she wonders if there’s a limit of information it can store. Maybe she will find out tonight. 

“But I wasn’t harmed by _him_ ,” she replies, after a beat. “Crazy as it sounds, it was my own doing.”

He exhales – something between a deep, weary breath and a tired laughter.

“Believe me, I know.” He’s still holding the towel with her blood on it, he’s still cradling the back of her head with the utmost care. From the storm brewing up in his magic, he’s still thinking about it – quite rightly, too. It’s hard to stop thinking about her imminent death, after all, despite how hard she’s trying. “But I made him swear you would not be _harmed_. I didn’t state it had to be _him_. You know better than I do that words are important when it comes to magic.”

She blinks him once, then twice. She opens her mouth, but all that slips past her lips is a breathless little exhale that elicits a soft look from him. 

“So,” she starts, raising her eyebrows. “He’s losing his magic?”

Ben hums, pressing the cloth back to her face, wiping the rest of the blood off her upper lip. 

“I suspect so,” he replies. “I can’t feel him anymore. He’s been getting weaker for a while now, but I thought he was just– you know, getting old. Or that he’d caught the bad end of a curse. The people he runs with are not exactly the most trustful magic users around, I’ve seen it for myself. But now I can’t hear him at all. It’s quiet, in here,” he adds, gesturing toward his temple. 

It makes her chest go tight and it reminds her, once again, she hasn’t much time left. 

“But why would he swear on his magic?” She frowns, confused. The first thing she’d learned while practicing magic, even on her own, was not to let anything take it away from her and it leaves baffled that someone as powerful and ancient as Snoke would make such a rookie mistake. “That’s an awful bargain to strike. Even kids know it.”

“I don’t think he noticed. Or cared.” He tilts her head back to better look at her and hums, probably satisfied by his careful work. His hand falls away, not before he’s stroked her hair and left a warm imprint on her skin, there where his fingers rested. “He was too busy gloating. He’d finally found a way to get to me, the rest didn’t matter. He’s always been like that. Well, I suppose it’s the only joy I can find in all of this.” 

He places the towel on the sink and helps her hop down from the counter, his arms finding their way around her hips as if the past few months hadn’t happened at all. It’s easy to fall back into this rhythm, this cosmic dance they’ve danced around each other ever since they first met, their magic merging, their bodies fitting so perfectly. 

“Well,” she says, scrunching up her nose. “If I’d known all it would take to get rid of Snoke would be actually dying, I would have cursed myself sooner.” 

He laughs, a quiet, mirthless thing that makes her shiver. “Definitely an easy solution. Why hadn’t we thought of that?” he jokes, then presses a kiss to her hairline. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you to sleep, you must be tired.”

_Dead tired_ , she wants to joke, but the words don’t slip past her lips. Instead, she places a hand on his heart, her fingers digging into the fabric of his sweater. He shivers and she wonders if it’s from the cold or from her closeness.

“Stay,” she tells him. 

It’s not a question, and yet she anxiously waits for his reply. It seems to her as if she’s spent her whole life asking this same question to everyone she’s ever allowed herself to love, even for a minute. Her parents, her guardians, her friends. 

It’s Ben, the one who finally gives her the answer she’s been waiting for all this time. 

He lets out a deep breath and presses another kiss to the crown of her head. “Of course.”

✨

She wakes up in the middle of the night to an empty bed and a dreading sensation in the pit of her stomach.

In the darkness, there’s just her heavy breath and her magic, tumbling out of her in waves of distress. As the shadows of the night loom over her, tender and unforgiving, it’s easy to dismiss the whole evening as a figment of her imagination – a dream or a nightmare, she can’t tell, for joy and horror are so intertwined that she can’t districate them at all. 

It’s so absurd that it’s not difficult at all, to think she’s dreamed it. 

But the other side of the bed, when she rolls over, is still warm, as if someone had left barely a few minutes ago, and Ben’s scent lingers on the pillow where she’s currently burying her head. When she rises from the bed and pokes her head out of her room, she notices a faint light in her living room, dancing on the walls and casting odd shadows all around.

She wraps her arms around her frame and burrows into Ben’s old sweater – the one she usually wears to bed – as she makes her way to him. When she finally reaches him, she’s greeted by an usual, yet strage, scene.

Ben is kneeling right in the middle of her living room, a piece of chalk into his fingers as he draws rune after rune in a magic circle all around him, bathed in the warm glow of all the candles he’s lit. 

There’s something magical in the way he looks as he stands there, propping his weight on his forearms as he kneels on the hardwood floor – something magical that has nothing to do with the power running through his veins and everything to do with the way he looks, intent and determined in the candlelight, his cheekbones even sharper in the trembling darkness and his eyes even brighter, almost feverish. 

He’s never looked less human. She’s never loved him so awfully much, as if her body were too small to contain such a devastating feeling. 

“Ben,” she calls him, then, as she stands on the threshold of her living room, rubbing her sleepy eyes. 

He turns so fast into her direction his hair falls in messy curls on his forehead. It gives him a more human look, as if this detail had made him real – not the creature of longing and desperation and mad, impossibile love she’d glimpsed in the candlelight a few seconds ago. He looks – almost boyish. 

“Hey,” he whispers back, his lips curving into a tentative smile as the light dances erratically on his face. “I thought you were sleeping.”

She wraps her arms around her body again and paddles toward him, careful not to step on the runes he’s clearly been drawing for a while. 

“I woke up and you weren’t there, so I got worried." She doesn’t tell him about the panic of thinking him gone again. He probably can feel it in the way her magic pulses around her. Instead, she sits on the floor in front of him, mindful of his circle. "What are you doing?"

He’s tired, she can tell. The shadows under his eyes are more prominent than ever, almost black in this light, resembling the bruises scattered all over her body. He’s still awfully pale, his moles standing out darker, and there’s a look about him and the nervous twitch of his eyes that speaks of restless sleep. She wonders if he slept at all, as he lay beside her.

Still, despite the weariness radiating off of him, there’s a stubborn determination in the back of his eyes and it comes as a surprise to her, the sudden realization that he’s not going to stop or rest until he’s done everything he can to save her.

She gulps. 

“I’m trying something,” he murmurs, working his jaw. “I had an idea to break the curse. I didn’t want to wake you up, you looked exhausted.”

She raises her eyebrows. A thousand questions fly through her mind and she wonders if he’s still trying to protect her despite how badly that plan backfired on him the first time, but she stays silent and stares at the runes he’s tracing. Then, a frown takes hold of her face when she realizes she can’t read the circle he’s drawing. 

“What kind of circle is this?” she asks, her fingers hovering over the runes, as if she could divine their meaning like this. “I don’t recognize it.”

He shrinks into his shoulders, runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he breathes out, softly. The candle next to him trembles slightly at his movements, casting an uncertain light on the sharp lines of his face. “That’s because I invented it.”

This takes her aback and it surprises her enough that she forgets to be scared and worried for a moment. Instead she frowns again and looks at Ben in wonder, watching his familiar face as he bites down on his lip, going over the runes he’s so carefully traced. 

“Wait,” she says. “You can do _that_? Invent a new circle, just like that? Why has no one told me?”

There’s a lot he knows about magic that she doesn’t, despite all of her efforts. Magic, for her, has been a terrible and wonderful discovery at the same time, something she’d found within herself, that gave her freedom but made her more alone than ever, too. Ever since she was a child, she’d taught everything to herself, every spell and every ritual, because there was no one around who could guide her.

Instead, for Ben, magic has never been this kind of incredible discovery – to him, magic was just something that was always, unsurprisingly, _there_ from the very first breath he drew into this world. 

She’s always envied him a bit for it. He never had to struggle for it – for him, magic was his rightful legacy, something he had always been sure of, something he never had to figure on his own because there was always someone there to guide him. He never had to second-guess himself and his powers, because his powers were something given from the very beginning. And yet, she knows he’s struggled because of this – that this, she supposes, is the reason why Snoke got to him in the first place.

Still, it’s hard not to be a bit jealous of him, when he tells her things like that. 

He lets out a non-committal sound, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. 

“Technically, yes, you can. Magic is virtually limitless and it stretches as far as your imagination can go. You can do anything that you set your mind to.” He runs his hand through his hair again, presses his lips together for a moment as if lost in his thoughts. “But in reality–” His eyes flicker to her for a moment, his lips curved into a pensive smile. “Well, no one has officially invented a new circle in a long time. It’s a difficult thing to translate your thoughts into runes, there’s no easy correspondence. Luke once told me that you must be some kind of genius, to come up with a new circle.”

There’s a slight flush on his cheeks that tugs at her heart. 

“Oh.”

He raises his eyes again. They look almost haunting, in the candlelight, warm and deep and full of sorrow. 

“I am no magical genius, obviously,” he says, with a shrug, as if it didn’t matter to him. “But I am desperate enough, so it must count for something. It will work. It _has_ to. I will strike a bargain with this curse.”

His words are laced with a desperate kind of determination that sends shivers down her spine. She burrows further into the sweater, wrapping it closely around her body as if to keep the bone-chilling dread away. 

“Ben, you can’t bargain with a curse,” she tells him, very softly, as if to reason with him. “It doesn’t work like that.”

A muscle in his jaw clenches. It’s so easy to recognize the expression on his face – furrowed brows, lips pressed together, that kind of stubborn hope that burns in the back of his eyes like a flame that nothing can put out, not even the world itself. 

It takes her breath away, the realization that he would do anything to undo this curse. She doesn’t think she’s ever been loved like this before. It is a hard thing to accept. 

“It will work,” he says, sternly. His voice is deep and low, but ripped at the edges, as if he were trying his best not to burst into tears again. Vulnerability pours out of him, spilling from his soul like a tide slowly rising. “I’m not going to lose you. Rey–”

He leans in, mindful of the runes, and grabs her hand. It’s so easy to intertwine their fingers – his hand fits perfectly in her own, as if they’d been made for this purpose alone. The light of the candles flickers at every movement, turning this moment into something haunting, a scene ripped out of a book of dark fairytales. His thumb brushes against the back of her hand, drawing small circles. 

“I want you to know, I’m not doing this because I’m asking for your forgiveness,” he murmurs under his breath. The words seem to tremble out of his lips, as if he were trying his best to keep his voice even. “What I did, the way I acted– it was terrible and I will never ask you to forgive me. And I’m not doing this for myself either.”

He stops for a moment, searching her eyes as if to read right into her soul. Sometimes she thinks he can – she’s never felt so exposed before, as if Ben could truly _see_ her and love her anyway. 

“The idea of living in a world without you– it’s unbearable. But that’s not the reason, either.” His thumb comes to brush against the freckles on her hand, as if to count them, as if to make a magic circle out of them. “I’m doing this because you _can’t_ die because of me. You can’t pay the price of my mistakes. You deserve to live.”

She squeezes his hand, never looking away from him. “It’s not your fault, that I cursed myself. That’s– that’s not on you. Not all of it, at least.”

At this, his lips curve into a sad smile and he shakes his head. 

“It doesn’t matter.” He brings her hand to his lips, planting a soft, worshipful kiss on every knuckle. “I love you. It’s a poor excuse for everything I did to you, but I love you. Whatever happens, whatever bargain I strike– Nothing can change that. I only ask you to remember that.”

Her hand is clammy in his, her breath coming in short, fearful puffs. The way he talks makes a dreading sensation spread from her chest to the rest of her body, cold fingers climbing up her back and stealing the air out of her lungs. It feels as if she’d been walking on a frozen lake and the ice had given beneath her feet, plunging her into a cold abyss that presses down on her heart. 

She almost claws at his hand, as if terrified of seeing him disappear before her eyes.

“Ben–”

But she doesn’t get to say anything. 

Ben lets go of her hand, so suddenly it almost hurts, so suddenly she can still feel the phantom presence of his fingers, there where they were laced with hers. Then, he looks at her one last time, lights up the last candle on the circle, closes his eyes and the world explodes in a flare of unbearable brightness. 

Rey can’t do anything but stare, even though her eyes hurt and tears are starting to stream down her face. It’s almost fascinating to see, in a terrifying way, beauty and terror mixing around him like threads of the same tapestry, intertwining on the familiar, yet alien lines of his face. Light erupts all over him, as if he was made of it, as if it was pouring out of him, and his magic is not a tenuous, trembling thing she can _feel_ anymore, but a conflagration all around her that attacks all of her senses. 

She can see it in the air, twisting in rivulets of golden light, and she can hear it, roaring in the eerie silence around them. She can smell it and taste it on the tip of her tongue – though it reminds of nothing of this world. She can even touch it, when she reaches out with her hand and the golden glow twirls around her fingers like water. 

Her heart is racing in her chest. “What–”

When she raises her eyes to look at Ben, she feels as if all the air had been knocked out of her lungs. 

He’s – _beautiful_ , glowing with some kind of terrible power, the light cascading off of him in bursts of white-hot incandescence. His skin is almost translucent, the golden radiance of his magic shining through him, and he looks more like some kind of powerful, ruthless and magnificent entity than a man. Her heart beats so loud she can hear it even over the clamor of his magic. 

His lips are moving, but she can’t make out any word. The only thing she can hear, as if it were a physical sound, is his magic – it curls around him and spreads out of him, taking hold of the world and shaking it to its foundation, rewriting it. 

It reaches her, too. It twists around her fingers, wraps around her arms, washes over her body like a wave that leaves her trembling and shivering. It feels like being bathed in light, like being wrapped in Ben’s embrace, like standing in front of a fireplace and letting the heat of it bleed into her frozen bones. Her skin prickles, her heart hammering away in her chest at a frantic pace, as if trying to break free of its cage of bones to throw itself into that impossible brilliance.

And then, just as sudden as it began, it ends. The brightness flares up one last time, so dazzling she’s forced to close her eyes, and then it disappears, plunging the world in a warm, velvety darkness. The only source of light are the candles still lit, casting a trembling glow on Ben’s features.

Everything is silent for a moment.

It takes both of them a minute to blink their eyes open. Rey watches him stir and shake his head and then he opens his eyes, his lashes fluttering slightly as if it were an effort for him. 

Still, his eyes are warm as ever when they settle on her. He looks human again – the Ben she loves, not the otherworldly creature she’s glimpsed in the unbearable light of his magic. She dies to brush the hair out of his forehead and hold him in her arms, but she stays put.

“I–” he starts, his voice faint and weary. He clears his throat, his eyes falling on her hands, anxiously looking at the slip of skin left uncovered by her sweater. “I think it worked. Did it work? Are you alright?”

As if following an unknown instinct, she rolls up the sleeves of her sweater and gasps as soon as she looks down at her skin. Freckles are scattered all over her arms, but that’s it – her skin doesn’t look as pale anymore and there’s no trace of the bruises that had turned her arms into a constellation of pain. It looks like they’d never been here at all. Her heart, there where it flutters erratically in her ribcage, feels lighter – there’s no hint of the dread that had poisoned every beat until this moment. 

She feels – _whole_ , again. As if he’d taken all the broken pieces of her soul and had put them together in a flare of blazing light. 

“It worked,” she murmurs, her voice full of awe. She raises her eyes to meet his and he’s looking at her with such _tenderness_ , fresh tears in his eyes. She feels her heart in her throat and she has to swallow it down, when she confusedly mumbles, “What– I don’t– _How_?”

His lips curve into a soft, tentative smile. “I told you I’d strike a bargain with it.”

That’s when it hits her. 

It’s all _too_ silent. Her ears are still ringing from the reverberation of the ritual, but as everything calms down, the world coming back to the old, uneventful normalcy, she realizes she can’t feel _anything_ – there’s only the familiar pulse of her magic, cursing through her body along her blood, beating with her heart. 

But from him, there’s only silence. 

It’s not a bad kind of silence. It’s different from the one she’d felt in the forest – that one had been eerie, crooked, twisted. A ringing sensation that reminded her of the absence of everything, the void where everything dies, at the heart of a black hole. It was a silence born out of a desperate need for control, a silence that meant to shut her out.

This silence, instead, is calm, uneventful, easy. Almost dull, in a way. Mundane. _Human_.

She brings her hands to her mouth, gasping. “ _Ben_ ,” she whispers, horrified. “Ben, what have you done?”

He looks so impossibly _tired_ , as if he’d aged ten years in the span of a few seconds. She can see it in his face, in the way his lips curve into a smile that reminds her of a grimace, in the way he heaves out a breath. 

But she can’t feel it. She can’t feel anything coming from him, from his magic – because his magic isn’t there at all.

“It wanted a life,” he tells her, softly. His lashes tremble again, but he blinks at her, fighting the exhaustion. “Magic– it’s a kind of life, isn’t it? A pulse that beats along with your heart. It was good enough for the curse, I guess.”

There are no words to describe the horror spreading through her limbs in this moment. Her body is frozen on the spot, her pulse quickening until it’s the only thing she can hear, her hands shaking. Every breath comes with a rattling sensation, as if it took her by surprise.

His magic – beautiful, complicated, magnificent and so incredibly luminous – is just… _gone_. Gone because of her.

“But–” she starts. Her voice comes out shaky, uneven. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until the first teardrops fall from her face. “But– your magic. You were so _good_ at it, you cared so _much–_ I can’t– I’m not–”

She doesn’t know how to articulate it – this feeling that takes hold of her mind, that squeezes her heart in a forceful grip that prevents her from breathing. 

She’s just not _worth it_. 

Ben – his magic was a radiant thing despite the shadows around him, fierce and magnificent and resplendent and he was so fucking _good_ at it and now he’s _human_ because he gave it all up for her and she’s not worth it, she’s just a kid from the desert who somehow managed to crawl her way into this life, and it’s not fair– 

He can’t feel her anymore – not the way he could feel her before – but he must notice her distress anyway, because he steps out of the circle and crawls over to her, taking her face into his hands. 

“Rey,” he murmurs, so softly, his voice so full of _love._ He loves her so much, she realizes, so much he’s willing to sacrifice a part of himself for her. She cries harder at that. “Rey, sweetheart. It’s alright. You’re alright. It’s over now, you’re safe. I promised you.”

She brings her hand to his chest, her palm pressed against his heartbeat. Steady and reassuring, underneath her fingertips. “But your magic–” she hiccups, the words echoing in the silence. “It was your whole life, you were so good at it, you’ve been training all your life– Why would you do that for _me_ –”

He looks at her in disbelief, as if she’d just asked him an obvious question.

“It was a small price to pay for your life,” he replies, gently. He brushes her hair out of her face, wipes her tears, looks at her in the eyes. He loves her. He _loves_ her to the point he’s struck a bargain with a _curse_. “Rey. I would make this choice a thousand times if I had to.”

It doesn’t make any sense. No one has ever wanted her – she’s always been an unclaimed baggage, drifting from place to place with nothing to tether her to anything. She’s felt like a ghost her whole life. She’s never, in all her life, been someone _worthy_ of love. Not this kind of love.

“Ben,” she breathes out, between sobs. She doesn’t know what to say, how to tell him that it’s crazy and absurd and she has never been loved like this and she doesn’t know how to accept it, this kind of impossible love that tugs at her heart in the softest and yet most intense way. So she repeats, pouring into this single word all her love and wonder, “ _Ben_.”

He leans in to press a kiss to her forehead. In the candlelight, his shadow on the wall wraps around her, the way his magic used to. 

“I’m not expecting things to change,” he murmurs against her hair. “I’m not asking for you to welcome me back into your life or even to forgive me. I’m not asking you to love me again. You don’t owe me anything. I just–” He pulls away from her, slightly, to search for her eyes. Even if there’s no trace of his magic, his gaze is still burning. She thinks that’s entirely him, a magic in its own right. “I love you. That’s it. That’s all there is to say, really.”

She’s still crying. She doesn’t think she’ll stop for a while. “You are–” She stops, as if to find a word able to convey the awe and the reverence and the incredulity swirling in her mind at the moment. “– _impossible_.” 

He curves his lips into a tentative smile. “I’m well aware of that.”

She huffs out a breath. This absurd, _devastating_ man.

It’s automatic, to twist her fingers into the fabric of his sweater and bring him down into a kiss. Ben gasps and it fills her heart with tenderness for this man, the fact that he didn’t expect her to kiss him at all, the fact that he didn’t expect her to want him, after he gave up a part of his soul to save her. 

But he doesn’t need to be told twice – his hands come to cradle her face, his fingers wind into her hair, gently, his body melts against her own. He kisses her as if he wanted to worship her, as if he were kneeling at her altar, offering himself up for sacrifice. It’s deep and slow and disarming in its tenderness. 

She can’t feel his emotions, but she can feel the way his heart picks up underneath her palm when she tugs at his hair with her free hand, she feels the way his fingers tremble as they slide down, curving around her waist as if to bring her closer. She hears the soft, whispered “I love you” he presses right against the corner of her lips when he pulls away to breathe. 

“Ben,” she murmurs. His heart flutters again underneath her hand when she whispers his name and he looks at her like that – like the whole universe exists just for her to grace it with her presence. She feels fresh tears in her eyes and buries her head in the crook of his neck to hide them. “I love you. I love you so much.” 

A shaky exhale slips past his lips and he shudders as his arms come to encircle her frame, holding her close to his chest. Home, she thinks, she’s finally home. She won’t lose it again, this fluttering feeling in her chest that tells her she’s finally found her place in the world, she won’t let anyone take it away from her ever again.

“Even after… _everything_?” he asks her. “Even… like _this_?”

There’s no magic to guide her anymore, not when it comes to his emotions, and yet she realizes in this moment there was never any need for it, because she _knows_ him. Because she can read the incredulous tone of his voice, the way it tilts and breaks on the last word, the way his fingers dig into the fabric of her sweater as if not to let her go andyet tremble as if he expected her to disappear right in front of him.

So she pulls away from him just to look him in the eyes and tell him, her voice soft and yet brimming with love and tenderness, “I never stopped.” Her hand comes to brush away the curls from his face and then she rests her forehead against his. “I love you, Ben Solo. You’re my home.”

At this, he cries too and they just hold onto each other for a moment, standing there in the middle of her living-room as the candlelight flickers, dancing in the darkness and casting their intermingled shadows on the walls. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice so full of emotion. She doesn’t need to read into his magic to understand him. She never had. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

“I know.” She kisses his forehead, softly. He trembles beneath her. “I know. I’m sorry, too.”

It will take time, she’s fully aware of it. The devastation these months have left behind is nothing so easily fixable with a whispered confession in the candlelight. The wounds her curse had left on her skin are gone, but the cracks in her heart are still there, despite how much Ben has given to mend them. It will be a hard thing, learning to trust him again. Learning to trust herself again. Learning how to be loved, again.

And yet, she _wants_ to.

He’s a bright, golden string that tethers her to this world and she won’t let him go. Not now, not ever. 

“Let’s get to bed,” she tells him, then, tugging at his hand. “We both need to sleep.”

Ben intertwines their fingers together, never letting her go. She puts off the candle with a flick of her hand and he watches her, and though she can’t know what he’s feeling, there’s no jealousy or longing on his face for the magic she’s just performed. He just looks at her with awe and radiant happiness in his eyes, lets her help him to his feet when he stumbles and presses a kiss to her forehead as they’re standing there for a moment.

They climb into the bed in silence, Ben curled up all over her. His arm rests around her middle, his face is buried in her shoulder. She’s surrounded by him and his warmth and she’s _home_.

She’s not a ghost anymore – she’s _alive_. Tomorrow she’ll wake up and it will be a new day and she’ll live and she’ll learn how to be alive in this world, with its impossible pain and terrifying happiness. 

But for now, she rests in Ben’s arms and it’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see? i haven't lied about the happy ending!! they still have a long way to go, of course, but they're alive and they're together and they're happy, they're going to be together and happy for the rest of their lives ♥
> 
> i still have a lot of fics i want to work on, but it will probably take me a while, bc classes are starting again and i have to power through my last year of uni :/ but you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/akosmia) where i complain about classes and post what i try to pass for "microfics" and on [tumblr](http://kylorensx.tumblr.com), where i reblog pretty pictures and quotes and shiposts to cope with 2020 *fingerguns* i hope you're safe and well, i love you all ♥

**Author's Note:**

> chapter two is coming soon, i promise! i actually posted this chapter to bully myself into finishing this fic so i will see you very soon!!
> 
> meanwhile, you can also find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/akosmia) and [tumblr](http://kylorensx.tumblr.com)!! also here's my [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.qa/akosmias) if u want to reach out about this fic or its tags on anon


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